Seti@home Expands Its Back Yard

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Seti@home Expands Its Back Yard

If E.T. is sending a cute little message our way, the chances that we'll find it are now a little bit better.

That's because Seti@home – the peer-to-peer computing project that ties together millions of computers to examine radio waves coming from space – is planning to increase the band of the electromagnetic spectrum it analyzes.

The project will now look at up to 20 times more data, a scientist at Seti@home said, partly because it has so many users that it is in danger of running out of radio data to send them.

There are two different processes involved in the Seti@home project – recording the data and analyzing the data. In the past, the analysis has been the limiting factor; the project had the ability to record mountains of data coming in from space, but because of scant computing power, only a small bit of it could ever be analyzed for extraterrestrial messages.

But there are now 3 million Seti@home users, and thousands of new people sign up to crunch data each day – making the entire Seti@home network more powerful than the biggest of supercomputers.

So powerful, indeed, that "we were running into the possibility that we'll soon run out of data to process," said Dan Werthimer, chief scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, which manages the Seti project.

To solve this problem, Seti@home is installing a Linux-based, super-fast digital data recorder that was donated by Hewlett-Packard. According to the company, the new machine can record data 10 times faster than the previous recorder.

"The data is streaming from 13 telescope feeds at a rate of 5 MB per second per feed. With more (input and output) capacity, bandwidth and increased speed, the system is excellent for real-time programming and has low interrupt latency," HP said in a statement.

Werthimer, of Seti@home, said that the project is still testing out the recorder, and that it will be deployed within the next couple of months.

"When we first install it, we won't use the full capacity," he said. "We want to plan for growth because more and more people are signing up everyday, and the people that are already running it are also upgrading their computers, adding more computing power."

The electromagnetic spectrum is a continuum – picture it as a "number line" – of electromagnetic waves of different wavelengths. Part of the debate in the search for alien life is what portion of the spectrum to analyze – that is, if aliens were sending us a message, at what frequency would they choose to send it?

The Seti@home project has been analyzing the microwave portion of the band because, Werthimer said, "if E.T. was sending us a picture on purpose, we figure he'd probably focus there." Since Werthimer has a charming, albeit suspicious, habit of calling people "Earthlings" in everyday speech, it's best to trust him when he says he knows which frequency E.T. would likely choose.

With the new capacity, Seti@home still plans to focus its analysis only on that microwave region, but now it will be analyzing a much larger portion of that region, Werthimer said.

"I don't guarantee we'll bag an alien in the next year," he added, "but eventually Earthlings are going to find out what's out there."